Good story. But is it digital?

By Scott Rosenberg

"The power to tell story is what separates man from dog."

Read that quotation from Mark "Spoonman" Petrakis' opening presentation here at the First Annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, and you'll probably have a few questions -- like, why the odd syntax? Why not say "a story"? And where'd the dog come in?

I need to tell you more: that Spoonman wears an eyepatch. That he has a blanket draped over his shoulders with a Raisin Bran box affixed to its front. That he waves a giant wooden spoon as he talks, in a mock foreign accent floating somewhere between Siberia and the Mediterranean. That he is telling an anecdote about the difference between animals, which may play with stories in their own heads but cannot communicate them, and human beings, who have always enjoyed gathering around a fire to trade tales.

I paint the scene; I relay an event.The quote makes sense -- it has a place in the world of a story.

What, though, might make it a "digital" story? In one sense, it already is one, since you're reading it on the World Wide Web.

As a writer, I can report the story to you second-hand, as I just did. On the Web, I could just as easily put up a picture of Spoonman.



Any newspaper or magazine could do the same thing. With a little more effort, I can throw in a digital audio file and let you hear Spoonman's voice. So now we're mimicking radio. With even more effort I can put up a video of his story and arrive in the vicinity of TV.

A computer can be an efficient printing press or broadcast device, and these versions of the Spoonman saga would all technically be "digital stories" since they're recorded in digital form. As a stage for storytelling, however, the computer only comes into its own uniqueness as part of a communications network. The most truly "digital" way I can tell you the Spoonman story is to send you to Spoonman's Web site to learn who the character is and what he's all about.

Immediately, then, the definition of "digital story" falls into two parts: We shouldn't underestimate the importance of digital distribution of stories, whether on CD-ROM or more likely across the net. It will change the business of publishing, the world of entertainment and the nature of community. It will allow more stories from more places to be told to more people. But if digital delivery makes something a digital story, then pretty soon all stories will be digital, and the term will lose any useful meaning. As digital photography pioneer Pedro Meyer argued at this morning's discussion, we don't call stories that happen to be delivered on a printed page "ink stories" -- and calling something that arrives via computer a "digital story" is just as superficial. The postal service is different, but the letter remains the same.

Then there are stories that could never have existed until the invention of computers -- experiments in hypertext fiction, interactive environments and multimedia narratives. These are undeniably "digital" in nature. But to what extent do they remain stories?

Such forms are in their infancy. But here are some questions that may help us figure out whether these experiments can share the label "story" -- and whether they can fill the important place stories hold in our culture:

Do they have characters with whom we identify? Beginnings, middles, and ends? Personalities? Playfulness, or beauty, or recognizable truth? Do they tell us about other people's lives? Do we remember them? Do they change us?

If the answers are all "no," then whatever it is, it's probably not a story. And if many of the answers are "yes," then we should hardly care whether we call it digital.